National Interdisciplinary Education Conference – Online Meetups, Seminars, and Webinars

The National Interdisciplinary Education (NIE) Conference is an annual event for educators, researchers, policy makers, and students who are active in inter- and transdisciplinary programmes at Dutch universities, university colleges, and universities of applied science. Inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration is currently being celebrated in academic and professional media.

The complexity and dynamicity of the scientific, technological, and societal problems generated by the coronavirus pandemic require an inter- and transdisciplinary approach. At the same time, our teaching, learning, and research is itself affected by the corona measures taken by our universities now that classes and seminars have been moved to online platforms.

The NIE team acknowledges that there is great demand for exchange about our current situation. We want to stay in touch and grow as a community of inter- and transdisciplinarians, and to exchange best practices and ideas. We therefore hereby announce a series of online meetups and seminars. We will meet approx. four times during the academic year. The first edition will take place on June 18, 2020 3-5pm and will include pitches for PhD candidates and short presentations for educators and researchers. We will use the June session to gather input for upcoming meetups, seminars, and webinars. Feel free to contact us, should you have specific ideas.

1. We organize pitches for PhD candidates and postdocs. Are you a PhD candidate or postdoc doing research in fields such as the Scholarship of Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning (SoITL) and beyond, and has your research been affected by corona measures? What solutions have you found for moving your research online? What questions to you have for your peers? Are you curious about their projects, solutions, and questions? If so, we invite you to submit a short (50-100 words) proposal and bio statement for a 5-minute pitch. Send your proposal to M.M.vanGoch@uu.nl and Teun.Dekker@maastrichtuniversity.nl, with ‘Proposal for NIE Pitch’ in the subject line.
2. We organize short presentations for educators and researchers. Do you teach an interdisciplinary course, and have you found successful creative solutions for online teaching and learning? Are you a researcher in the fields of the Scholarship of Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning (SoITL) and beyond and have you studied your own and your colleagues’ ongoing interventions? Do you want to present best practices that your peers may want to implement in the fall? If so, we invite you to submit a short (50-100 words) proposal and bio statement for a 10-minute presentation. Send your proposal to I.vanderTuin@uu.nl and H.deZwart@uva.nl, with ‘Proposal for NIE Presentation’ in the subject line.

The deadline for proposals is May 29, 2020. We will inform you asap if we could fit your pitch or presentation in the schedule of the first online NIE meetup. Further information about the online platform we will use, as well as other details, will be communicated asap as well.

The National Interdisciplinary Education Conference – Online Meetups, Seminars, and Webinars are an initiative of Teun Dekker (Maastricht University), Merel van Goch and Iris van der Tuin (Utrecht University), and Linda de Greef, Machiel Keestra and Hans de Zwart (University of Amsterdam).

Unfortunately, we had to cancel this June’s conference due to COVID19 prevention measures. We do hope to welcome you in Maastricht another time to make up for this year’s event. We will be in touch.

Due to the current Covid 19 pandemic we have decided to extend the call for abstracts until 15 April 2020. The registration deadline will be extended accordingly. Of course there are still many unknowns, but we hope to welcome you in Maastricht in early June.

We are happy to announce that the Fourth National Conference on Interdisciplinary Education (NIE) will take place on June 5, 2020, at Maastricht University.

The organising team now invites proposals for the theme Interdisciplinary Education as a Pathway to Global Citizenship. 

In an ever more complex and interconnected world, future generations will need to interact, work and live together with people from a wide variety of backgrounds and cultures. Moreover, in such a world, their actions and choices can have far-reaching consequences, affecting people all over the world for better or for worse. To successfully function in this context, one requires Global Citizenship skills. In recent years, more and more universities have made the fostering of skills like perspective taking, normative and change agent skills an explicit goal of the education they offer.

Many have argued that interdisciplinary education is an excellent way of cultivating global citizenship. The fourth National Interdisciplinary Education conference will bring together teachers, researchers and students to explore the relationship between interdisciplinary education and global citizenship. It will be an opportunity for educators to discuss a range of questions relating to this issue, such as:

• What are global citizenship skills? Why are they important?
• How can interdisciplinary education foster these skills?
• Should this be a goal of interdisciplinary education?
• What are some best practices on how to integrate global citizenship skills in interdisciplinary curricula?
• What are the challenges in doing this and how can these be dealt with?
• What are ways to assess global citizenship skills, or are there other ways to provide students with feedback on such skills?

While the conference focuses on global citizenship skills, we also welcome contributions on other issues of interest to interdisciplinary educators, such as, for example, assessing interdisciplinarity, understanding the role of interdisciplinary education in reaching the sustainable development goals, or  rethinking student – educator roles, and many more.

The conference will bring together educators from a wide range of interdisciplinary programs from across the Netherlands and Belgium, and offer traditional paper presentations, but also workshops, discussions and an opportunity to exhibit educational materials and practices. Anyone who has anything to share relating to this topic is welcome to submit a proposal to the organizing committee.

Please submit your proposals via https://maastrichtuniversity.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_elWLIZPRSLrX6jX by March 31^st, 2020

Applicants will be informed if their proposal can be accommodated by April 20^th, 2020. Please note that participants and attendees will be charged a registration fee.

The 2020 organising team:

Prof. Teun Dekker (Liberal Arts and Sciences, University College Maastricht), Dr. Herco Fonteijn (Faculty of Psychology and Neurosciences, Maastricht University), Dr. Karlijn Haagsman (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University), Prof. Valentina Mazzucato (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University), and Dr. Simone Schleper (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University)

We are pleased to announce that Utrecht University will host the 3rd National Interdisciplinary Education Conference, taking place January 22, 2019. Utrecht University is a pioneer of broad, interdisciplinary education: its first interdisciplinary programmes in the humanities and the social sciences  were founded 30 years ago. Utrecht University now offers eight broad undergraduate programmes, including two university colleges, as well as many interdisciplinary graduate programmes.

The 2019 National Interdisciplinary Education Conference’s theme will be integration. Integration, in the context of interdisciplinary education, can have multiple meanings. It can mean integrating insights from different disciplines, in order to create a more comprehensive understanding of a complex issue that constitutes of more than just the disciplinary parts. It can mean integrating people – students and staff; town and gown – to account for the diverse population of society and academia. It can mean integrating research into education and education into research, improving science and academia as well as teaching and learning, for example by translating interdisciplinary research into interdisciplinary education and by promoting empirical research on interdisciplinary educational practices. Aside from these three subjects, many more themes come to mind when thinking of integration with respect to interdisciplinary education, and we invite participants to share these matters at the 2019 NIE Conference.

More information, including important deadlines, will follow in September.

Dear participant,

We want to thank all the speakers, workshop leaders and our contributing visitors for a very successful second National Interdisciplinary Education Conference. With around 100 conference participants for the second year, it has been proven that interdisciplinary education is not just a buzz word, but something that people are interested in. Moreover, and the evidence can be found in recent university policy documents, interdisciplinary education has become part of the global state of the art thinking in higher education curriculum renewal.

During the conference, different educational designs were shared and discussed, advancing an innovative mind-set, providing inspiration, research and tools for the development of future interdisciplinary initiatives. The video of the keynote and the abstracts of the papers are all available on the conference website.

We hope our community will continue to grow and is willing to keep sharing knowledge and practices, either during the next conference or in the LinkedIn group ‘Interdisciplinary Education’.

In order to rotate the organization between higher education institutions in the Netherlands and Flanders, we want to invite you to host the next conference. If your institute is interested in becoming next year’s host (February 2019), we invite you to come forward and send a proposal to NIE2018@tue.nl (see the format below). The deadline for the application is May 15th.

We hope to see you all next year!

On behalf of the committee,
Birgit Pepin
Linda de Greef

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Host the 2019 National Interdisciplinary Education Conference

Proposal by

Tentative conference theme

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About the conference planning committee

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The hosting institute can provide and organization team and conference committee and/or staff support sufficient to handle the details of conference administration.

 

About the hosting institution

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The hosting institute must be an accredited Institution of Higher Education in the Netherlands or Flanders / The hosting institution must have interdisciplinary curricular emphases in place or in development.

 

About the venue / location

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Necessary facilities are: A location suitable for plenary sessions which can accommodate approximately 150 participants, a registration area and at least 4 additional rooms for parallel sessions.

 

Timing

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The hosting institute finds a workable date for the conference in January / early February.

 

Budget

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The hosting institute is responsible for financing costs that are not fully covered by the earnings from ticket sales. We are seeking to maintain a conference fee that is affordable to most. The host may want to offer student rates and early bird rates.

 

Thank you for your interest for hosting the 2019 National Interdisciplinary Education Conference.

We kindly ask you to send this form to NIE2018@tue.nl before 15 may 2018.

Watch the video of Ines Lopez during the NIE Conference 2018 right here!